Modern computer systems have been designed and built around long-standing philosophy that memory components are fast and network and storage components are relatively slow. Further, the communication protocols for memory, storage, and network components are generally incompatible and require multiple layers of software at the interfaces to translate memory commands into storage and network commands and vice versa. Therefore, commands and data in a computer system spend significant time traversing and translating from each bus, fabric, or network to access processor memory. In response to these communication challenges, the computing industry has developed a memory-semantic communication model called Gen-Z that allows commands and data to freely move between memories located on different components via a unified communication path. Gen-Z is a consortium generated memory-semantic communication model that overcomes interface communication challenges and provides opportunity for high performance, low latency, and cost-effective computing solutions.
However, a challenge with adopting and implementing Gen-Z communication models is that not all of the features and functionalities provided by existing physical server configurations are available with Gen-Z fabric solutions.